Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:
As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the
waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink
satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold
crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without
the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times
story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security
risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene,
that it is hard to believe.
The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew
better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy
intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration
with a concentration in information security and digital management,
according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at
court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme.
For people who are unaware, "STINKY" was the default wifi ssid for at least a time. [0] It is a very distinct ssid, which plays into the discovery of the illicit Starlink: [1]
Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking
questions about it. Some of these questions came to Marrero directly, but she
denied knowing anything about the network… and then privately changed its
Wi-Fi name to “another moniker that looked like a wireless printer—even
though no such general-use wireless printers were present on the ship, the
investigation found.”
